What Would Change My Mind?

Here, I call on EconLog readers to try to change my mind! 

Let me start this out with a proverbial throat-clearing on what we all know are the well-worn difficulties of changing someone’s mind. Doing so is often very difficult, and people are reluctant to change their mind. And we’re all biased to believe we are all more open-minded than we actually are. That said, I do think I’m better than most at being willing to change my mind, even on very fundamental issues that have major life implications. Two examples – for a significant fraction of my life, I was a quite devout and believing Christian. But I am now an atheist, because I encountered a variety of arguments I found convincing and thus changed my mind on the subject. (This also makes me somewhat skeptical when people say things like “it’s pointless to debate religion, nobody ever changes their mind,” because I certainly did, and I know many others who have as well, for the same reasons as me.) Second, I used to have such a meat-heavy diet that I was pretty close to people who abide by the so-called “carnivore diet” today. But I read Michael Huemer’s debate with Bryan Caplan over ethical vegetarianism, and I stopped eating meat that same day, because I found Huemer’s arguments far more powerful and convincing than Caplan’s. I felt no difficulty with abandoning my lifelong religious beliefs or fundamentally altering my diet and lifestyle once coming across persuasive arguments that were contrary to my own views at that time. 

So, here’s a few things I believe to be true that are, I think, controversial enough that a number of readers would dispute. Now, I’m not asking you to try to adjudicate the issue in the comments here – there’s only so much one can do in a blog post or a comment. Instead, if you disagree with my take on something, what would you hold up as the best, strongest, most persuasive account for the opposite view – an argument you’d personally be willing to sign off on? Depending on what comes through, I’ll pick one and read it, and might turn my reaction into one of my multi-post in depth reviews. 

With that stage now set, here’s a few ideas I have in mind.

1. Moral realism – the idea that there are objective moral facts about what is right and wrong, independently of what anyone thinks about them. That is, if Nazi Germany had won WWII and gone on to conquer the entire world, and all subsequent generations had been raised to believe that the Holocaust was a great good, it would still be the case that the Holocaust was wrong. While this isn’t exactly an unpopular view of mine (moral realism is the majority view among philosophers, after all), there’s still enough disagreement out there to make it worth exploring. If you incline towards moral antirealism, what book or article or essay do you think makes the best case?  
2. There is nothing morally special about the state. By this I don’t mean state action is never justified. What I mean is that there is nothing that justifies coercion by the state that does not also equally justify coercion for an individual. If a situation doesn’t justify coercion on the part of an individual, it does not justify state coercion either. Again, this does not mean that justified state action is an empty set – because justified individual coercion is also not an empty set. But the two sets are equal, or so it seems to me. Additionally, I reject what Jason Brennan calls the “special immunity thesis” in favor of the “moral parity thesis.” That is, the actions of the state are to be evaluated by the same moral standards as any other person or organization, and can be justly resisted on the same basis. If you disagree and believe that the justness of coercion depends not on the circumstances creating the justification but rather on who is doing the coercing, what’s the best argument you know supporting this? Or if you believe that agents of the state enjoy a special moral immunity against being resisted when acting unjustly, what argument do you think makes the strongest case for this? 
3. Equality of outcome has no intrinsic value. While there might be instrumental benefits to equality of outcome, the benefits are instrumental only. Of course, being “merely” instrumentally beneficial doesn’t mean something is unimportant. But still, equality of outcome has no value in and of itself. Imagine one world of vast, crippling, and equal poverty, and another world where nobody suffers from any poverty but some are better off than others. Someone who believes in the intrinsic value of equal outcomes could still accept that the second world is better overall – they might allow that the intrinsic value of equal outcomes is outweighed by the instrumental value of eliminating poverty. But they would still have to argue that there is at least some sense in which the first world is better, even if the second is better overall. To me, there is no sense in which the first world is better – equality of misery and suffering doesn’t create an offsetting good by virtue of its equality. But if you do think that there is real, intrinsic value on equal outcomes, what is the best argument you can point me to? 
4. There is no coherent concept of aggregated decisions or preferences. That is, phrases like “we as a society have decided” such and such are at the very best a misleading shorthand, and at worst are fundamentally incoherent. There is no meaningful sense in which individual decisions can be aggregated into an overall social decision, or individual preferences somehow average out to a meaningful social preference. But perhaps you disagree, and believe that there is some deeply meaningful concept of social preferences. If so, tell me who makes the strongest argument for that case and where I can find it. 

I’ll leave it at these four for now, but if this proves fruitful I may try this approach again. Commenters, have at it!

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